Microsoft In Talks To Buy Shoutcast And Winamp From AOL

Well I thought the chance was none zero when WinAmp was going to expire directly. I upgraded it to 'slim' in the event Microsoft actually buys it from AOL.

alexwright2• 13 years ago

It would either stagnate or go in the opposite direction.. and we don't need another WMP.

ChickeNES• 13 years ago

I was really hoping they would just open source it.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

Would love if this happened, but I wasn't hoping for it. It's a shame, though.

netvisao• 13 years ago

It's more to it than simply open source it. I work for AOL, and know some folks who worked on Winamp on a personal level. Winamp has proprietory licenses for some of its codecs for every install AOL pays licensing fees which it does recoup via other services (such as search agreements with GOOG or Shoutcast major partners). If it were to AOL to open source it, it need to strip our those pieces, translating into few months of work on the clock.

afreak• 13 years ago

Have to wonder if this is one of those situations where Microsoft wants to buy it to figure out later what to do with it.

ewams8• 13 years ago

Starting a Winamp fund. 100k to join. If >9 other people join me we will make AOL an offer. Contact in profile.

possibilistic2• 13 years ago

If you're genuinely serious, do you happen to have $100k to invest in other projects? Because I have lots of ideas. Website in profile.

untog• 13 years ago

Good old Hacker News

ChrisNorstrom11• 13 years ago

That's now how investing works. What you're asking for is a "gamble" with no guarantee of a return on investment. Ideas are everywhere, ideas are endless. Some of the greatest "ideas" make no profit because there's no market for them, consumers don't care for it's implementation, or the team doesn't work well together. So many things have to go just right for an "idea" to become a business. Sometimes you have a great idea, great implimentation, great team, and it all still fails. Investors want you to have already gone and proven you're not a gamble by at least building a minimum viable product, have some sort of team already assembled and working, and have started making some kind of revenue or growth in users. If you have nothing then you're the type of investment that's really a gamble.

Winamp has a return on investment (a slow one but still a return), your ideas on the other hand are a gamble. I don't mean to discourage you I just want to save you some time. Also asking random people to invest in your ideas is also illegal. You have to have a pre-existing relationship with someone /or/ join a community like AngleList to solicit investment. Angel investors also must have an income over a certain amount of money. Some of these laws may change in the near future with crowd funding becoming so popular but in the mean time be careful.

jreposa• 13 years ago

I get it's a piece of history, but how do you monetize this? Convert it to paid software? Streaming service subscription?

benologist2• 13 years ago

Winamp has a 10,000,000 - 50,000,000 installs android app, that opens up a lot of possibilities.

jdotjdot• 13 years ago

It already was paid software! (Even if you didn't actually pay for it)

ewams8• 13 years ago

From linked articles it has ~6mm in revenue already. Clean that up, optimize and then spread out.

angryasian• 13 years ago

what would be the intentions ? With projects like audacious I don't even see how open sourcing would be a good idea ?

ape4• 13 years ago

The usual. Require Microsoft login. Move those users to the closest Microsoft products.

ewams8• 13 years ago

Open source was not in my comment nor is it the intention of the Winamp fund.

libraryatnight• 13 years ago

Makes me wish I had money - I hope others who do take you up on this.

ChrisNorstrom11• 13 years ago

I'll gladly join in as a UI UX Designer for equity, website is in my profile.

I also emailed you the numerous ways to monetize Winamp by extending it's functionality into the social space. See my email "Winamp Fund - UI UX Designer seeking to join"

There's at least 4-5 ways to monetize Winamp and build it out.

brymaster2• 13 years ago

Sweet. The world needs more freemium, gamification, ads, subscription plans and "social."

voltagex_2• 13 years ago

Why not help with an open source player?

ewams8• 13 years ago

Have spoken with a few people already. Of those, three others have currently offered support. Need help even if you do not have funds:

What we need are contacts at AOL and AOL Music. If you know anyone that works at AOL or anyone that has a relationship with someone at AOL let me know.

PS. Had two offers with BTC pledges, unfortunately that would make things more difficult so please just help with USD or personal contacts.

ewams8• 13 years ago

5 on board.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

Do you think Microsoft is offering AOL less than $1M? Selling to Microsoft would be an easier transaction and a bigger headline.

But I do think your venture is much more interesting! :)

jc_dntn• 13 years ago

Did a monkey write this?

"picked up through its 1999, $80 million acquisition of Nullsoft in 1999. But today Techcrunch has learned that AOL is talks with Microsoft"

Audiophilip• 13 years ago

Please don't insult the monkeys.

anaphor• 13 years ago

Looks like a poorly coded markov bot wrote it

taopao• 13 years ago

not time 4 profred, in internets FIRST post winner!

Demiurge• 13 years ago

Wow, if they replace Windows Media Player with it, and embrace shoutcast, that would be great. But probably not going to happen, so I wonder what they're thinking.

drivingmenuts• 13 years ago

They're probably thinking "We can co-opt the userbase and make media-sharing lucrative".

What'll most likely happen is that they'll buy it and let it hang on in its current state like some half-wounded animal, kind of like Skype.

MrZongle22• 13 years ago

I fear that these technologies will suffer the same fate as Caligari TrueSpace: the IP is purchased, thrown into a bin somewhere on campus, and abandoned.

GFischer• 13 years ago

Hadn't heard of Caligari TrueSpace before now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSpace

Winamp probably has a huge userbase compared to Caligari though.

MrZongle22• 13 years ago

Yes, I'm sure it did (does). TrueSpace was priced around $300, which tended to put a damper on adoption.

As a 3d modeling and animation package, it served as a poor man's Lightwave 3D or Maya. The interface would probably give some designers fits. Still, it was a useful and nimble application and one of my first experiences with CGI. If I could get it to reliably run on an XP SP3 box or in a VM, I'd probably still be playing with it.

Drexl• 13 years ago

Am I the only one that noticed the article that AOL declined to comment on is by a company they own?... I find that rather humorous. AOL owns TechCrunch according to TechCrunch themselves.

sneak• 13 years ago

I wonder if they're going to get the rights to Gnutella and W.A.S.T.E. in the deal too.

masklinn• 13 years ago

Not much rights to use, both projects have been living in the wild for a decade.

pit• 13 years ago

Remember all that fun we were having yesterday?

benmorris• 13 years ago

Step 1. Insert backdoor

caycep• 13 years ago

I feel like Winamp should be open sourced. There's enough enthusiasm here to guarantee a fairly healthy dev community. How does it compare with the default KDE/gnome players? Would it add anything of value to what is already out there?

(never used them since my linux boxen are all either networking or imaging focused, not desktop)

rithi• 13 years ago

Decent options. Amarok, Rhythmbox, Clementine. I'm happy with Clementine.

xfax• 13 years ago

I've got to say, never saw that coming. Good for the WinAmp team - better than having to just shut down the business.

sandGorgon• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if the posters on this thread are serious (w.r.t fundraising/designing/contributing for Winamp), but here's is my thought:

I would venture that doing this exact same thing for Foobar2k is going to have a higher possibility of success than for Winamp. Secondly, while Winamp has mostly been in maintenance, Foobar is now considered an audiophile grade player (bitperfect?) (e.g. [1]) . There's also this team that has built a stripped down version of Windows 8 with Foobar for audiophiles ([2]) There is usually a post every now and then on Hydrogenaudio forums, asking if Foobar2k can be opensource/ported to linux, and the answer is the same - the authors have no plan to make it so, because in all probability they are waiting for a financial outcome of all this work.

Be warned that the authors can come off a bit... prickly. But I suspect that is the side effect of handling a huge freeloading community for many years.

Disclaimer - I have moved off PC audio for a while now. I prefer listening to my audio on the phone streaming from my laptop over Plex (however, I got interested in Foobar again while trying to build a stripped down Windows 8 using AudiophileOptimizer[2])

[1] http://archimago.blogspot.ca/2013/06/measurements-part-ii-bi... [2] http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/iso-usb-key-i...

voltagex_2• 13 years ago

I don't know why Foobar2000 is closed source.

probably_wrong• 13 years ago

I agree that the posters might be more successful in getting the source code from Foobar than Winamp, but I don't think it's a better move.

The post regarding Winamp closing has 892 points and 520 comments now, which I think it's the largest number of comments I've seen in a HN history - although it's probably not the overall largest, it's a clear sign that the Winamp brand is still incredibly valuable.

Compare that to Foobar2k. In that thread it was consistently rated as the best alternative, and yet how do the users see it? "Closed source, confusing at best, current authors come off a bit prickly".

Winamp is not just a media player - I'd argue that by now it's closer to an ideal. Getting the rights for that brand sounds to me like the best idea.

ksk3• 13 years ago

Why is MS doing this? They should just leave WA alone.

IMO, every passing day SME-sized consumer software companies are going to find it harder to survive. I wish there was a consumer market for well written compact software that just does its job well, doesnt mine your data, doesnt try to push some shitty subscription model or advertisement crap onto users.

efdee• 13 years ago

Given the choice between WinAmp disappearing and Microsoft adopting it, what would you pick?

In the first case, your only solution is to stick with one of the older versions that are offered for download on some OldVersions page (since AOL is apparently removing their download links). In the latter, you still have that solution, but now there's also the possibility of Microsoft keeping it available, or screwing up newer versions.

All I can see is hope.

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

Winamp disappearing by far. I haven't used it since my Windows days but it should die with dignity rather than turn into another Skype.

ksk3• 13 years ago

I was secretly hoping that somewhere down the line WA would get opensourced :)

xtracto2• 13 years ago

I would like to have WinAmp open sourced. I think it would be an amazing contribution to the library of open source software.

poub• 13 years ago

I think it’s a great opportunity. Shoutcast has a greater installed base than Icecast. But more importantly a really passionate user base.

However there is broken feature by design on ALL those streaming services: they stop for whatever reason.

As a listener it’s a terrible experience. It’s alaways when you start listening something you really like that it stops.

And you could think it stops because I try to listen on the mobile, so that’s normal. NO it stops even at home on your desktop. When you start listening a stream, you’re 100% of one thing : it will stop but NOT when you decide to stop it.

But it wouldn’t be that hard to build a system that actually use a better caching system and pretend to be live instead of trying to stream a live content.

Listeners already grasped the idea of listening events which are not “live” thanks to podcasts.

In fact what is streamed nowadays is mainly pre-recorded songs/stories. So the notion of “live” is absolutely not necessary unless you’re broadcasting sports or once-in-a-lifetime events. And then TV / FM does a much better job.

That said, Shoutcast services are mainly non-live type of streams anyways.

So there is a great opportunity to buy the installed base of Shoutcast creators and listeners and Winamp userbase (pro-anti itunes).

The main idea is you change the sofwtare to make it work even when there is no internet connection.

A better caching system needs to be made on the device itself and on the server side.

In terms of monetization, it’s easy: audio adverts have already proved financial success.

It does work only because of their repetition AND their relation with the audience.

The best example of audio adverts are the songs with high rotation counts: they are the adverts of the big labels.

Here you got a system of dedicated listeners that you can target repetitively, endlessly, fairly (you don’t have to stream blocks of minutes of adverts)

Audio ads on webcast radio start to catch up with Radionomy systems by example.

AOL proved they couldn’t leverage that community. I don’t think Microsoft will do any better job as their main focus will be “integrate”. A strategy that rarely works.

Of course “a non-stop stream even without internet connection“ can happen without buying Shoutcast & Winamp, but what a fantastic opportunity and shortcut for those who can.

xtracto2• 13 years ago

Oh man, Shoutcast brings me fond memories. There used to be some very good (albeit illegal) show providers like EveryShowSucks (ESS). The nice thing about the shoutcast model, is that you could just tune into a channel and consume whatever was available (knowing it was going to be good).

It is something that is not available in the Netflix-es, and Hulus of the world (and something that Cable still has).

Microsoft In Talks To Buy Shoutcast And Winamp From AOL

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